Maybe I’ve been in this industry too long. Maybe I’m a complete moron. Maybe it’s a little shade of both and some of a third. Who knows. The point is that everywhere I seem to look, nobody knows about one of the most useful word matching algorithms. Not text matching as that’s a horse of a different color. Words. Word. The difference is subtle, but it is something that seems to come up a few times a year over the past decade for me, where if I had known about it earlier in my career I would probably have more hair now. The difference is this: word matching, you want to match near-exact gramatical terms. Not necessarily something that rhymes or sounds similar (that’s a something else entirely), but words that are one in the same with different suffixes. Yeah, it’s a little weird and out there, but it’s a problem that seems to bolster its head about every once in a while and knowing about Word Stemming will make your life just a little easier. Again, maybe everyone learned about this in their infancy and I’m just an idiot. Though, every time I use it in a solution, I surprise at least one person… hence why I bring it up now.